5 process maturity levels: Where are you?

Remember the first days of your business? Remember how messy it was? Things are unstructured, and success depends mostly on individual effort.

As your business grows, you will face the need to search for better, more stable ways of working. This journey is what we call process maturity.

Capability Maturity Model (CMM), a framework started from software development but now widely used across industries, gives us a guide on understanding our own process level and seeing what needs to change.

Let’s see where you’re standing.

Level 1: Initial (ad hoc)

At this stage, there are few or no consistent processes. People manage their way out of problems, and results can vary widely depending on who is doing the work. Success often depends on personal effort rather than reliable systems, and when experienced staff leave, quality often drops.

New team members learn by watching others or asking questions, since there’s little documentation to guide them. Mistakes happen and are likely to happen again, since there’s no clear way to prevent them.

This is the level most start-ups fall into, which is expected. However, staying at this level for too long makes it hard to grow or adapt.

Key traits:

• Inconsistent results
• Reliance on individual memory and effort
• No standard process or documentation
• Difficult to scale

Moving to Level 2:

Begin with something manageable. Choose one or two routine activities, such as onboarding new customers or handling invoices, and take the time to record how they are currently done. There’s no need to aim for perfection at this stage. The goal is simply to capture existing practices. Once that’s in place, focus on making the process easier to repeat, simply by using tools like templates, checklists, or defining the roles clearly.

Level 2: Repeatable (managed)

At Level 2, the organization begins to create a basic structure. Teams begin to write down some simple procedures or checklists, and people start using them more regularly, which makes it easier to repeat successful work.

However, inconsistency across the whole organization still remains, as teams often build their own separate systems, and there’s no centralized control. Under pressure, people might still fall back on old habits. Even so, having some process in place is a big step up from having none at all.

Key traits:

• Basic process discipline in certain areas
• Local repeatability but no enterprise-wide standards
• Dependence on team-level knowledge
• Fragile under stress or scale

Moving to Level 3:

Work toward building a shared process language across teams. Begin by gathering best practices from different parts of the organization and shaping them into consistent, company-wide standards. Support this effort with clear documentation tools and designate process owners to help maintain clarity and coherence.

Most importantly, focus on training that explains not only what needs to be done, but also why the process exists and how it supports the broader goals.

Level 3: Defined

At this point, the organization agrees on one standard way of doing work. There is a common way of doing things, communicated through manuals, internal wikis, or onboarding programs. Teams can now coordinate more easily without confusion, and new hires no longer have to guess how to do a certain task. The business becomes more stable, and teamwork improves across the board.

Key traits:

• Company-wide process standards
• Clear documentation and ownership
• Better onboarding and cross-team coordination
• Operational consistency

Moving to Level 4:

Begin collecting data, because you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Identify a few key performance indicators (KPIs) for each major process: How long does it take? How many errors occur? Where do things get stuck? Choose metrics that reflect quality, speed, and cost. Then, use dashboards or simple reports to share this data across teams. As patterns emerge, you’ll be able to see what’s working, and what needs attention.

Level 4: Managed (measured and controlled)

At this stage, the focus shifts from defining processes to measuring them. The organization begins using data to monitor performance. Metrics like turnaround time, quality scores, and defect rates help teams understand how well they’re doing. Decisions are based on evidence, not assumptions.

This quantitative management allows for greater control. Leaders can spot issues early and respond quickly. For instance, if the data shows that customer service response times are slowing, staffing can be adjusted before problems grow. Methods such as Six Sigma or statistical process control may be used to reduce variation and improve quality. The goal is predictability. When performance drifts, there are instant mechanisms in place to bring it back on track.

Key traits:

• Processes are instrumented with metrics
• Leadership uses data to manage performance
• Predictable outcomes and controlled variability
• Process improvement is driven by analysis

Moving to Level 5:

Foster a culture where improvement becomes a shared responsibility. Encourage everyone, especially those on the frontlines, to contribute ideas for making work more effective. Support small-scale experiments and recognize small wins. Rather than waiting for problems to force change, use data to ask: “How can we do this even better?”. Create regular opportunities, such as process review meetings or kaizen workshops, for teams to reflect, share insights, and explore improvements together.

Level 5: Optimizing (always improving)

The final stage is not about reaching perfection, but about never settling. Even strong processes can be better, and at Level 5, the organization embraces this idea fully. Continuous improvement becomes part of the culture.

Some companies optimize regularly, while others build it into daily operations. Some improvements are just small updates, while others may involve rethinking an entire process. Feedback is regularly gathered and used. Teams are encouraged to suggest changes and experiment with new ideas. Lessons from past projects are collected and applied to future ones. All these efforts share a steady focus on making things better.

What makes this stage different is that the organization doesn’t wait for problems before taking action. Instead, it looks ahead, studies what might go wrong, and updates processes to prevent issues before they even emerge. This makes mature organizations resilient: they won’t stop adapting, refining, and moving forward.

Key traits:

• Continuous improvement is built into the culture
• Ideas for change come from every level of the organization
• Processes evolve through data, feedback, and innovation
• The company adapts faster than most

Sustaining this level:

Keep this momentum by connecting process improvement to the business strategy. Use insights from operations to inform decisions at the top. Look outside your industry for ideas, and benchmark your performance against leaders. Invest in tools and systems that support tracking, testing, and refining processes. Most of all, keep improvement visible. Celebrate it. Talk about it. Make it part of your identity.

Final thoughts

If you’re at Level 1 or 2 today, especially as a young or growing business, that’s completely normal. But if you’re aiming to scale, now is the time to roll up your sleeves. The important thing is to keep moving. Each level builds on the last, so don’t try to skip ahead. First define your processes, align them across the teams, then measure them, and finally improve them.

This staged journey mirrors a broader discipline known as Business Process Management (BPM), which provides the structure and tools to manage this evolution. We’ll explore that in the next article.